May 23, 2017

Invest In Africa (IIA), in partnership with Ernst & Young (EY), and African Development Bank (AFDB), have organized a two-day training workshopon taxation for 120 Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs), in Accra .

The forum which was aimed at creating thriving businesses through Taxation & Quality standards brought together field experts to acquaint SMEs about the rudiments on how to improve their businesses ideas through the use of relevant information on the benefits of taxation and business growth.

“There is too much bureaucracy and too much compliance inthe country at the moment which is an obstacle for the development of SMEs,” Robin McCone, Director for EY, told the B&FT in an interview.

He explained that “SMEs are the engine of most economies in the world and if you don’t have a healthy active SMEs who find it easy to pay tax then you are not a country. You got to make it easy for entrepreneurs to pay tax because they don’t want to be criminalised and this as a result is depleting economically viable businesses in the country which otherwise could have thrive to boost growth of the economy.”

Mr. Sam Brandful, Ghana Manger for InvestInAfrica in an interview with the B&FT said:“The IIA is a non-profit organisation which is being put together to see how we can support businesses with their access to skills, market and finance.”

“Our vision is to create thriving African economies, that is our broad vision and we want to see our country have a thriving business economy.”

 Access to market he said: “Is done through our Africa partners pull platform and online platform, www.africanpartnerpool.com, which allows businesses, big corporation as well as smaller companies to engage with each other to build on their tenders, procurement needs, goods and services and the smaller SMEs can respond and supply those things as it fits their line of business.”

According to him, access to skills is also achieved through capacity building and skills development programmes, which have got business linkage programmes, business accelerated programmes, the canon print programmes and these are all training programmes that the businesses on the Africa partner pull can participate in to build their skills to improve good business practices.

Commenting on the one - district one -factory regarding the training, he indicated that it is not specifically, in response to that at such but for the one district one factory is a pro-business policy to grow businesses across the country and IIA align with businesses improvement, growth and create more jobs for captains of industry.

Patrick Akan-yidi of PRECOP Ghana, a participant of the training shared with the B&FT that “I have learnt a lot, quite honestly most of the things we were introduced to from the beginning are new and they are things which actually happen on the ground. The theory aspect helps though, but I have really appreciated the technical education being received from this workshop.”

The experts he said: “Are not only training us to know but are also showing us some of the red flags and pre-warning us on the nitty-gritty on the field of business.”

thebftonline.com